I climbed into the car, leaving the door open.
“Pull it closed,” said the tall man. I pulled it closed.
“Put your hands on the back of the front seat.”
I put my hands on the back of the front seat.
The sedan pulled away smoothly and proceeded down the street at a sedate twenty miles an hour. With his revolver muzzle gently pressed between my second and third ribs, the tall man reached under my arm and removed the P-38 there. It occurred to me I might as well have saved myself the discomfort of carrying a heavy gun around in this heat, since I never seemed to get much use out of it when it was needed.
“You can sit back now,” said his lordship.
He moved to the far corner, keeping his gun muzzle steadily pointed toward me, but no longer touching my side.
“Just as a matter of curiosity,” I said, “how did you find me after I left your bowlegged friend at the railroad station?”
His bowlegged friend emitted a low growl, but the tall man’s grin remained friendly. “Easy, chum. Or rather, Mr. Moon, if chum is too familiar for your taste. Had a spotter on. your flat.” His grin crooked slightly, and his eyes flicked at the back of his companion’s head. “You made Harry look kind of like a monkey at the railroad station, but that train stops at the west end station before leaving town, so he didn’t have to ride very far. Harry can act real quick, once he catches on.”
Without turning, Harry growled, “I suppose you wouldn’t have gotten on the train at all, master mind.”
I asked, “How’d you pick me up on the way to the station?”
“We got a system, chum. Mr. Moon, that is.”
“Sure,” I said. “You got a phone call from the Lawson house as soon as your employer found out we were leaving.”
“You’re a bright boy, Mr. Chum. See why we have to be careful about you?”
He grinned at me as though I were a favorite nephew, but the tone of his voice made the short hair back of my neck stand out straight. I was afraid I knew what he meant by being careful.
With a casualness I was far from feeling, I asked, “This is a kiss-off trip, is it?”
“Why, chum,” said the tall man mockingly. “How you carry on. Harry and I wouldn’t harm a hair of your pretty little head.” He paused, then added almost as an afterthought, “Unless you didn’t feel like telling us where you took the kid.”
“Grace Lawson?”
A metallic glitter for an instant showed behind the mockery in his eyes. “You been hiding any other kids recently?” he asked softly.
“I haven’t been hiding anyone at all,” I told him. “We got arrested for jumping off the wrong side of a train, and Grace kicked a cop in the shin. Grace is still in the clink, so if you’ll just call for her at police headquarters and post a hundred-dollar bond—“
The English lord transferred his pistol to his left hand and let me have the back of his right across the mouth. I sat back and stopped talking in favor of licking the blood from my lips.
We reached the edge of town, and our chauffeur opened up to fifty. When no one had said anything for two miles, I tried my luck again.
“Long as I won’t be able to repeat it to anyone after this trip,” I said, “who’s paying you for this?”
All mockery had disappeared from the tall man’s eyes, to be replaced by a hard metallic glitter. “Life’s too uncertain, chum. We could get in a wreck with a cop car, or blow a tire and turn over and me and Harry get knocked out while you stay awake.”
“Oh, sure. Or maybe my fairy godmother will turn you into a pumpkin.”
Harry said, “There’s the road ahead, but there’s a car behind us.”
I started to turn my head, but the gun suddenly jabbed my ribs. “Eyes front, buster.” To Harry he said, “Turn anyway. If he’s following, he’ll turn, too.”
Dropping his speed, Harry signaled for a left turn, braked nearly to a halt and swung into a narrow dirt road. I caught a glimpse of a sign reading, Long Pine Lumber Mill, then dust rose about the car in a cloud as Harry jammed the brakes to the floor. Behind us I heard a car swish past down the highway.
Only my window and Harry’s were open, but dust billowed through them to settle on our clothes and cling to our perspiring faces. When Harry wound his window shut, I followed suit, which made the car an oven.
“Maybe if we asked someone, we could find a better road,” I suggested.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” the tall gunman told me tolerantly. “Six days a week tractor lugs grind this road to powder. But on Sunday there’s nobody closer than seven miles.”
Apparently deciding the other car had definitely gone on, Harry shifted into low and moved ahead. Our road was little more than a dirt trail, with underbrush crowding it so closely we scratched against it on both sides in the narrower spots. The July drought had parched the road surface, after which it had been pulverized by tractors to an ankle-deep layer of dust. Even though we proceeded at a moderate speed because of holes and bumps hiding under the dust, we left behind us a billowing, impenetrable screen.
For about a mile we wound through heavily under-brushed wasteland and timbered area until we came to a circular widening large enough for the car to turn around. Harry swung its nose back in the same direction from which we had come and stopped.
It was like stopping in a dense fog at night. An opaque brown blanket pressed against the car windows, blotting out the sunlight. For nearly a minute we sat quietly waiting for the dust cloud to settle, which it did gradually until it became a thin haze. Now we could see the underbrush each side of the road, but straight ahead suspended dust still formed a blank wall.
“Want to tell what you did with the kid?” asked the tall gunman.
“I told you,” I said.
“All right,” he said evenly. “Get out, then.”
XI
I MANAGED TO GET A MOCKING SMILE on my face as I climbed out of the car. But the next time you admire a movie hero facing death with a mocking smile, don’t believe his expression. Inside he is just as scared as you get when a truck nearly runs over you, and if anyone said, “Boo!” to him, his hair would turn white. We were all three sweating profusely, but I imagine Harry and the English lord were sweating warm salt water. The stuff running down my face and inside my clothes felt like melted ice.
Two feet from the car was a hard-packed ridge of dirt along the edge of the road, where the tractors’ lugs had not ground the surface to powder. For some reason I carefully stepped across to this so as not to sink up to my ankles in dust, as if it made any difference whether or not a corpse had dirty shoes.
Before the tall man followed me, Harry swung open the right front door, drew his heavy automatic, and centered it on my chest. The English lord stepped across as carefully as I had, but with his white suit and white shoes he had more reason. As soon as he had satisfied himself that he was practically unsoiled, he took over the job of covering me while his companion joined us.
A pale cloud of dust still hovered around us, not enough to obscure vision, but enough to tickle your nostrils. Along the route we had come it seemed to grow thicker, probably merely because we were looking through more of it and its density accumulated, rather than because it actually was thicker. Thirty yards away it was like looking at a blank wall.
Harry said, “It’s my turn, ain’t it?” and cocked his automatic.
The other man raised one eyebrow. “This guy is mine, chum. That’s the agreement—in special cases you can go out of turn.”
“So what’s special?”
“The guy slugged me, didn’t he?”
“Don’t let him push you around, Harry,” I said brightly, in a voice that quavered only slightly. “First thing you know he’ll be making all the big kills and all you’ll get is the kids and old ladies.”
“Shut up!” Harry said, his eyes cold and his heavy automatic beginning to swing upward.
I started to hunch my left shoulder with the intention of swinging,
not that I had the faintest hope my fist could beat his bullet, but on the theory that almost any action is less stupid than simply standing still when someone wants to shoot you. Then the sudden sound of a motor froze all three of us.
“Hold it!” the tall man snapped at Harry.
He turned to face the thinning wall of dust, beyond which the sound of a powerful car roared nearer and nearer. But the squat man’s eyes never left my face.
A car shot from the haze, I caught a flash of yellow and then it was past, leaving us engulfed in a blanket of dust. For a moment visibility sank to five feet, but it was still enough for Harry to keep me safely covered, and I knew at the slightest move he would press the trigger.
Brakes screeched as the other car stopped just beyond us. Then as the taller gunman worriedly tried to squint through the dust, another sound broke through the opaque curtain.
“Motorcycle,” said Harry, both his gun and his eyes still aimed unwaveringly at me.
After the first moment of the other car’s passage, the dust settled sufficiently to allow about a ten-yard area of visibility. Suddenly through the haze appeared the most welcome sight I have ever seen—a state trooper on a motorcycle, riding slowly through the fog of dust with one foot trailing.
The tall man’s hammerless revolver barked once. The slug caught the trooper in the shoulder, spinning him backward clear of the slowly moving machine, which crashed on its side in a shower of dust.
At the same moment a pistol barked from the other direction, and a bullet whispered past my forehead so close it actually singed one eyebrow. Harry’s gun swung from me toward this new offense and chattered off three shots as rapidly as a machine-gun burst. Before the third shot sounded I was diving headlong past the radiator, and as both Harry and his pal began to fire furiously at their flank attacker, I skittered on hands and knees toward the prone cop, raising my own personal dust screen as I went, and nearly choking to death in it.
The cop was still alive, for he groaned just as I reached him. Jerking open the flap of his holster, I swung out his service revolver and spun toward the car, drawing back the hammer as I arched the gun. It was lucky I managed this operation all in one motion, for dimly through the haze I made out Harry standing by the open car door on the driver’s side, his automatic centered between my eyes.
Our guns sounded together, but mine must have been the shade of a second before his, for the bullet whistled over my head. Mine caught his upper right arm, spinning him around so that he half tell and half climbed into the car. The engine was still idling, and even with a useless arm he managed somehow to start it jerkily forward.
The English lord, in the seat beside him, was trying to get a shot past the driver and through the window, which was impossible unless he sent it first through Harry’s head. I got a bead on Harry’s face, and it would have been like shooting a sitting bird if I had not suddenly had to fall flat in self-defense when bullets from the flank assailant began to whiz all sides of me.
The sedan picked up speed with a roar of power and surged drunkenly down the road while I was still groveling. The sudden departure left the scene again shrouded in dust.
In an invitingly sweet voice I called, “Gre-ene!”
“Yeah, Sarge,” he answered cautiously. “You all right?”
I got to my feet. “Just dandy. Come here a minute.”
His dim shape materialized from the dust cloud, and he approached with a delighted grin on his face. He stopped three feet away.
“Come a little closer,” I said.
Looking puzzled, he took one more step toward me.
I haven’t timed a left hook so beautifully since my last professional fight. He sat in the dust for a full minute shaking his head back and forth. But when he finally got to his feet again, he didn’t swing back. He merely refused to speak to me.
By the time we got the motor cop to the university hospital, which was the nearest one, he was in shock from a shattered shoulder. We must have looked like two black-faced comedians carrying a third. Since Greene had stayed on his feet in the ankle-deep dust except for momentarily assuming a sitting position, he was covered only by a light film. But I had literally wallowed in the stuff. It was in my shoes, down my back, in my hair, and even in my pockets. On top of that, the temperature still hovered around ninety, and perspiration had converted a good portion of the brown dust to black mud. Once as a kid I fell head first into a barrel of oil, but aside from that experience I have never been dirtier in my life.
As though minstrel performers were a common occurrence in her life, the registration nurse recorded information without exhibiting a sign of curiosity. But when an orderly had wheeled the wounded man away to surgery, she directed us to a mop room containing a deep sink, apparently used for filling buckets.
“You two would ruin the public washroom,” she told us. “Wait here a minute.”
In a few moments she returned with a bar of laundry soap, a handful of rags, and two towels.
A half hour later our clothing was still dirty, particularly mine, but at least we were again recognizable as human beings. Mouldy dignifiedly waited until I was through cleaning up before he began, still maintaining his aloof silence.
Back in the lobby we found two state troopers and the town constable waiting for us. We spent another half hour explaining things to them, with me doing all of the talking, and ended by phoning Warren Day’s rooms long-distance. The constable let me talk to him.
Though it was Sunday evening and Day hated to be disturbed off duty, surprisingly he was not in a churlish mood. He was in one of his pixie moods though, which was just as bad, for his sense of humor takes a practical bent and he was quite capable of asking the constable to hold us overnight if it occurred to him that would be a funny joke. Recognizing the mood, I explained what had happened without needling him in my usual inimitable manner, and asked him to vouch for us to the town constable.
“How do I know you didn’t shoot the cop?” he asked.
I laughed heartily. “You’re a card, Inspector.” Then adroitly I changed the subject. “This tall hood definitely tried to pump me about where I had hidden Grace Lawson. And I forgot to tell you there was another attempt on her life this morning. I’m afraid your theory that brother Don was pulling the attempts on Grace is full of holes.”
In spite of his blind adherence to his own theories, once Warren Day is definitely convinced he is wrong, he makes no bones about it.
“I guess it is,” he admitted. “We’ll throw out a net for your two playmates. Give me their descriptions.”
I gave him an item-by-item description of both assailants, speaking slowly so that he could write it all down.
“The squat one is wounded,” I told him. “It may be only a flesh wound, and a bandage might not show under his coat. But on the other hand, I may have gotten a bone. Have your men watch for either a guy with his right arm in a sling, or with a stiff right arm.”
“All right,” Day said. “I’ll phone this in to headquarters. Soon as you get away from there, get down to the criminal records and identification department and see if you can pick out their pictures. If they’re on file, we’ll put photographs in the hands of every man on the force.”
“Check,” I said, and turned the phone over to the constable.
Even after Warren Day vouched for us, we were held another half hour until the wounded trooper regained consciousness and was declared out of danger. His evidence did little to corroborate our story, since in the dusty confusion he had no idea who had shot him, and only knew he had been chasing a yellow convertible for a traffic violation.
It was at this point that Mouldy broke his reproachful silence in order to explain his part in the affair. It took the combined interviewing experience of the constable, the two state troopers, and myself to get a coherent story out of him, but we finally managed it.
Having been ordered by Fausta to watch over me, my ordering him off had not discouraged Mouldy. He simply circled the b
lock, picked me up again, and followed. How he came to realize the black sedan was also following me was not clear, and how he prevented its occupants from detecting his gaudy convertible even less clear, but somehow he managed to stick to the sedan’s trail.
He even showed a flash of normal intelligence by going on by when the sedan turned into the mill road, but in his eagerness to swing around and come back again, he reverted to type. Two hundred yards beyond the mill road was a traffic signal at an intersection with another main highway. Mouldy picked that spot to make a U-turn through a red light, causing a semi-trailer to swerve around him, which in turn drove the state trooper and his motorcycle into a ditch. The cop was chasing Mouldy to give him a ticket when he ran into all the gunfire.
“Let me see your license,” one of the troopers requested when Mouldy finished his tale.
“Do you have to have a license?” Mouldy asked.
They were all three pulling out their traffic ticket books when it developed Mouldy had thought they were talking about a license to make U-turns, and produced a perfectly valid driver’s license.
I think they were relieved to let us go.
Although he still professed not to understand why I had slugged him, Mouldy’s dignified aloofness had evaporated by that time.
“If we ever have another war, I’ve got the perfect secret weapon,” I told him on the way back to town. “I’m going to give you to the other side.”
“I got you out of your scrape, didn’t I?” he asked.
I was forced to admit he had.
I instructed Mouldy to drive to police headquarters. Together we went inside and proceeded directly to the criminal records and identification department. The night-duty clerk, a big blond cop in his early twenties who wore a crew haircut, was reading a love-story magazine.
“Inspector Day phoned,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you. Let’s just check those descriptions again.”
Gallows in My Garden Page 9
